Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then in a low voice,
‘You ... eh?’ I don’t know why we behaved like lunatics. I put
my finger to the side of my nose and nodded mysteriously.
‘Good for you!’ he cried, snapped his fingers above his head,
lifting one foot. I tried a jig. We capered on the iron deck. A
frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the virgin forest
on the other bank of the creek sent it back in a thundering
roll upon the sleeping station. It must have made some of
the pilgrims sit up in their hovels. A dark figure obscured
the lighted doorway of the manager’s hut, vanished, then,
a second or so after, the doorway itself vanished, too. We
stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our
feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The
great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass
of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in
the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life,
a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple
over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his lit-
tle existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty
splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ic-
thyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great
river. ‘After all,’ said the boiler-maker in a reasonable tone,
‘why shouldn’t we get the rivets?’ Why not, indeed! I did
not know of any reason why we shouldn’t. ‘They’ll come in
three weeks,’ I said confidently.
‘But they didn’t. Instead of rivets there came an inva-
sion, an infliction, a visitation. It came in sections during
the next three weeks, each section headed by a donkey car-
rying a white man in new clothes and tan shoes, bowing